Without warning, the door to his cubicle slid open. He was glad he’d finished pissing; getting caught in the act would have embarrassed him, even if it wouldn’t have flustered the Lizard who caught him. He’d seen this fellow before: he recognized the body paint. “I greet you, superior sir,” he said. Anyone who flew in space had to know the Lizards’ language.

“I greet you, Johannes Drucker,” the Lizard named Ttomalss answered. “I am here to inform you that you will soon be released.”

“That is good news. I thank you, superior sir,” Drucker said. But then his mouth twisted. “It would be better news if it did not mean my not-empire had been defeated.”

“I understand. I sympathize,” Ttomalss said. Perhaps he even did; he showed more knowledge of the way people worked that any other Lizard the German had met. Drucker wondered how he’d acquired it. Ttomalss continued, “But you will have the opportunity to help repair the damage.”

I’ll have the opportunity to see the damage, Drucker thought. He could have done without that opportunity. He’d been a panzer driver, not a spaceman, when the Reich detonated an explosive-metal bomb to derail a Lizard attack on Breslau. He’d cheered then. He wouldn’t be cheering now.

“Can you drop me near Peenemunde land?” he asked. “That is where my… mate and my hatchlings live-if they live anywhere at all.”

But Ttomalss made the Race’s negative hand gesture. “Captives are being exchanged outside Nuremberg, nowhere else.”

“Very well,” Drucker said, since he couldn’t say anything else. From Bavaria to Pomerania through a war-ravaged landscape? Not a journey to look forward to, but one he would have to make.

“Eventually, a shuttlecraft will take you back to the surface of Tosev 3,” the Lizard told him. “In the meantime, now that hostilities have concluded, I have gained permission to inform you that you are not the only Tosevite presently aboard this starship. Are you interested in meeting another member of your species?”